Facebook post puts PCHS on alert Tuesday

Wednesday

Nov 21, 2012 at 10:24 AMNov 21, 2012 at 10:27 AM

Cynthia Grau

Tuesday morning classes at Prairie Central High School in Fairbury came with heightened security after suspicious posts on the social media website, Facebook, alarmed school officials.PCHS Superintendent Dr. John Capasso said that there weren’t any threats involved and the school wasn’t on lockdown. He also said that parents were notified of the situation via an automated phone message at 7:15 a.m. Tuesday morning.“We’ll just continue to monitor and be vigilant of information that comes to us and try to be proactive if we do hear of something. We will take precautions in the interest of keeping the kids and staff safe,” Capasso said.He said, over the course of a couple of days, Facebook posts from a student claiming to be moving into the community and looking to make friends slowly turned odd and bizarre.“A number of kids started to de-friend this student, which caused a flurry of exchanges. The mother of this student basically took everyone to task for de-friending her daughter and bullying issues, making comments about how there are school shootings caused by bullying. No specific threats were made, but it was just enough that we thought we didn’t know enough about the situation to know that it’s completely harmless, so we decided to take some precautions,” he explained.He said the situation did not warrant a school lockdown, but students were not allowed to use book bags from class to class.“We did decide to involve the police and they gladly came. We had a couple different levels of police to patrol the grounds, hallways and corridors. The staff is always watchful of the kids but today, they were just especially watchful,” he said.A student told the Daily Leader that they were told that police were checking the IP address of the Facebook profile as part of the investigation. That student also said that water fountains in recessed or more remote areas of the school are off-limits and only the fountains in open areas are allowed to be used.“Hopefully we’ll get this quieted down and get back to business fairly soon,” Capasso said. He added that there would still be a police presence at the school today, as students will be dismissed early for the Thanksgiving holiday.